Ericsson, freed from Sony and getting in its retaliation first, used a Mobile World Congress pre-event briefing to set out its Far East battle plans - which included mobile wallet payments and buying billing biz Telcordia and carrier-cosy Wi-Fi company BelAir Networks.
There was a time when the mobile infrastructure companies …

Ericsson was always free of Sony

In saying that Ericsson is now free of Sony you seem to be confusing a small subdivision of Ericsson called Ericsson Mobile Communications (or EMC), that made handsets and was merged with the Sony handset division to form a joint venture called SEMC, with the behemoth that is Ericsson in general.

Ericsson has always appeared at the MWC in its own capacity on top of any representation by EMC/SEMC considering, as the article points out, they are an enormous player in mobile infrastructure.

To be fair

It is always amazing to see so many people at Marconi still holding on to Marconi's 2k dot com "glory". Even BT didn't want the product for 21CN, I think only Telstra was left.

Marconi had no product that anybody was willing to pay for, post dot-com boom. There was no product map ready to deal with IP convergence either.

It had its heyday, but in the end failed to deliver in spite of acquisition by a major telco. Ericsson tried merging Beeston and Coventry, they tried to revive the product plan. If they planned to get rid of it all along, they would not have made so many stabs at trying to get it to work.

My short stint at Marconi/Ericsson was the craziest phase of my career. People were constantly blaming Ericsson. I think if people forgot Marconi and woke up to the actual needs of the telecom market, it would have been a different story.

I hope Telcordia and BelAir employees look to the future and not the past.